It’s not every day that you would associate the words ‘food diary’ with children and young people living on the streets.  After all to maintain one they would need food to begin with. Child Rights and You (CRY) volunteers, in their many years of working with children in situations of poverty, realised that the general public don’t really understand what hunger means for children. So volunteers met with children from various backgrounds like those living on the street, young people involved in begging, tribal children and those commonly termed vagrants, to understand more about hunger in measurable terms, through a measurement of the calories they ingest on a daily basis. 

Chronically hungry

Two-and-half-year-old Surjo Basfore lives with his five-year-old sister on Platform No 4 of the Kalyani Railway Station in Kolkata. Their combined earnings -- about Rs 20 to 25 a day -- are handed over to their father, who also begs for a living. Breakfast is about half a puri, which brother and sister share. Lunch is about two handfuls of dal and rice. They usually don’t get an evening snack. Dinner is about two more handfuls of dal and rice or one chapati. Doing the math is easy. The total calorie intake for both children put together is about 1,000 calories. Surviving usually on food thrown away by railway passengers, they face chronic starvation.  
They are too young to understand irony. But both children live within shouting distance of Kalyani’s Food Corporation of India (FCI) godowns which have store about 11,000 metric tonnes of foodgrains.

More than eating

A few years ago the Supreme Court said that foodgrain left to rot in India should be distributed to the poor. Children like six-year-old Vishal will never know. He starts his day with half-a-cup of tea and two biscuits bought by his mother from a pavement stall. Breakfast is one samosa-pav. Lunch is khichdi from a local charity, half of which he saves to eat in the late-afternoon. By night he’s really hungry again, which is when a small packet of fries is bought for Rs 5 – the only amount his mother can spare. Vishal’s recommended dietary intake should be about 1,715 calories. He barely makes 800. Food might be scarce but Vishal’s address is a posh one. He stays in the backyard slums of Mumbai’s Khar area known for its schools, shopping malls, hospitals and steep residential property prices. All it lacks is an anganwadi, which would have gone a long way to keep children like him fed.

Tribal and neglected

Six-year-old Dharma Pahariya and Sani Paharin, from the Godda district of Jharkhand, called the Santhal Pargana, have been eating only rice and salt twice a day. Their total calorie intake is a meagre 440 calories or about one-fourth of the 1,715 calories they should be eating.

Hailing from the Pahariya tribal community they live in a parched forest that has not seen enough rain in the last few years. Food is scarce. Malaria and Kala-Azar are still dreaded threats, as they were 200 years ago. Earlier this year, media reports on the spurt of Kala-Azar cases in tribal-dominated Boyarizore and Sundar Paharia blocks in the district, prompted the Godda health department to push the panic button. But little has improved.

Food is so much more than just filling stomachs. Both doctors and people who work with children state that nourishment gaps at this age will result in lifelong poor health. Such severely malnourished children will not have age-appropriate levels of development in terms of height, weight and cognitive development. 

For such children the options are rather limited. A local nutrition rehabilitation centre (NRC) in Majhgaon, near Satna in Madhya Pradesh, a Government of India programme, runs a 15-day ‘course’ to bring near-death cases of malnourishment back from the brink of death with a two-week injection of essential food. The centre admits and gives food to only infants, and not to older children or parents, making the entire effort rather pointless, given that usually entire settlements are dying of hunger. Media reports say that 10 children have succumbed to hunger over the last year in this area.

“The condition here is so bad that the food distributed by the neighbourhood anganwadi is brought back home by the children and shared with the entire family,” says Sasmita Jena from CRY. “And since the infants are small they are the last priority and are only breastfed by the mother.”

It wasn’t easy for the volunteers working on the project to gather the data. Satyajit, the volunteer from Kolkata, who documented Surja’s food diary, says, “Extreme poverty, poor health and malnourishment made Surja’s parents reluctant to participate in the project.”

There was a time when Oliver asked for more and changed the way literature viewed orphans forever. Hunger stalks every child who is poor, whether from tribal areas or urban pockets of poverty. India’s children in poverty might not all be orphans but they certainly need more, especially in terms of nourishment.  After all. stable economic growth can’t be sustained on a future that’s so hungry today.

(Paromita Pain is a senior reporter and sub-editor with The Hindu and its feature supplements Young World and NXg) 

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 W hy people are talking about.
The Clemenceau

An old French warship, the Clemenceau, has been making a lot of people in India very angry. And this is neither because it is French nor because it is a warship, but because the ship contains asbestos, an extremely dangerous substance. The ship, now too old to be used in warfare, is making its last voyage to the shipyards of Gujarat where it will be dismantled and broken down so that its metal can be sold. This breaking down process will expose and release the asbestos, harming the workers who are doing the ship-breaking.

Many environmental and social organisations in India and abroad have tried to stop the Clemenceau from coming here, saying that Indian ship-breakers were not properly equipped to deal with asbestos. If the 27,000-tonne warship was to be broken down in France or some other developed country, the workers would receive proper tools to do the job, protective equipment and clothes to make sure they don’t get affected, and medical treatment to ensure their health was not being damaged.

In India none of this happens and workers could be dangerously exposed to asbestos. This lack of caring for workers is one of the reasons it is cheaper to break up the ship in India rather than in France. This is why many ship owners, including governments, send their ships here rather than do it at home. But it does mean that Indian workers may get incurably sick.

No one knows for sure how much asbestos the ship actually contains. The French government says just 45 tonnes of asbestos is left on the ship, the rest has been removed. But the company that helped partially get rid of the asbestos claims that there is still between 500 and 1,000 tonnes left.

Asbestos is considered so dangerous by some that the ship was actually stopped by the government of Egypt before it could pass through the Suez Canal for fear that it would contaminate the surrounding area. The ship had to wait three days before it was allowed to continue to India after assurances from the French government that it was indeed safe. In fact, international laws ban sending such dangerous waste to other countries. The Clemenceau is obviously a waste, a hazardous one at that, but the French government has gotten around these laws by claiming that the ship is not ‘waste’ but some kind of leftover ‘war material’.

What’s all the fuss about? Asbestos is a naturally occurring fibrous mineral technically called ‘hydrous magnesium silicate’. It occurs in many forms and is mined from its deposits. Its usefulness stems from two properties: the mineral is made up of thin fibres and hence can be made into cloth or mats; secondly, it does not burn. Asbestos has been long used -- the ancient Egyptians used it to make burial cloth and it has been used in lamp wicks for centuries.

In modern times, when asbestos is used, the fibres are typically mixed with cement or woven into fabric or mats, which are thermally and electrically insulating as well as fire-resistant. Asbestos was used in buildings for these properties, but nowadays it is most commonly used in car brake linings and electrical fittings.

Asbestos was used a lot more until the last 20 years when it was discovered that, though useful, it is also extremely dangerous. Asbestos is made up of tiny fibres and the mineral itself crumbles very easily into these fibres which are then very easily breathed in. Most of the asbestos fibres that can be breathed in are so small that they cannot be seen without the use of a microscope. They are about 3.0-20.0 µm in length, but can even be 0.01 µm. Compare this to a human hair which is between 17 and 181 µm thick. One large asbestos fibre can break into hundreds of much thinner smaller fibres. The smaller they are the more dangerous they become since they can be more easily blown around and inhaled. The inhalation of these tiny asbestos fibres causes illnesses, the most serious of these are:

  • Mesothelioma -- cancer of the lining of the chest or abdominal wall.
  • Lung cancer -- all types of asbestos can cause the disease. Smoking increases the chances of getting the disease.
  • Asbestosis -- a scarring of the lungs that causes them to work far less efficiently and make the sufferer unable to do much physical activity.
  • Stomach cancer.

One of the most worrying things about asbestos is that it has a latency period of 10-40 years, meaning that if you are exposed to it today, the disease could actually arise 10-40 years from now. There is no cure for asbestos diseases, but early identification can prevent further worsening of conditions. Those who get mesothelioma have a very low chance of surviving and 75% die within a year of it being discovered.

Since the recognition of its dangers, though not banned totally, over 40 countries have banned the use of asbestos. For example, the United States has banned all construction-related products that have an asbestos content of 1% or more.

There are three commonly used types of asbestos. There’s brown asbestos, which is mostly found in Africa. Blue asbestos, found in Africa and Australia, is commonly thought of as the most dangerous type of asbestos now but was used in many products until the early 1980s including asbestos cement sheets and pipes for building construction and for electrical, thermal and chemical insulation. Then there’s chrysotile, or white asbestos, which is found in Canada where it is extensively mined. It crumbles less than other types of asbestos and so some people consider it safer than the others.

White asbestos continues to be used in India although other kinds such as blue and brown asbestos are banned. Though there is some mining of asbestos in India, most of the asbestos used in the country is imported from Canada, which actively promotes its use.

The health hazard of asbestos has actually been known as far back as 1898, but it was officially recognised in 1918 when a US insurance company produced a study showing premature deaths in the asbestos industry in the United States. There, where the ill effects of asbestos have been most studied, asbestos was one of the first hazardous air pollutants controlled by law.

Asbestos-related diseases have become publicly well known because once they discovered how dangerous it was, sick workers in the US have been taking asbestos companies to court. Most asbestos companies actually went bankrupt and closed down because of the amount of money they had to pay to workers. The total number of American deaths related to asbestos range between 200,000 and 265,000. In the UK, over 3,000 people die every year from asbestos related diseases. Of course, there are many more deaths around the world, especially in developing countries. It’s just that they are not so well documented.

In countries like France, when a building containing asbestos has to be broken down or repaired, there are strict rules that have to be followed. Jobs that would normally take six months could take up to 10 years to put in place procedures so as not to expose workers and the general public to asbestos. Examples of such long asbestos-removal processes include the Jussieu Campus (started in 1996; work was still going on in 2005) and the Tour Montparnasse which will take 10 years to complete.

In any case, why should India take something that is considered unacceptable in France? The Indian government knows of the danger, since asbestos mining has been banned here on health grounds. Yet they are letting the Clemenceau in. The workers in the Indian ship-breaking industry are not as well protected as in France. Given the fact that breaking asbestos is probably the worst thing to do to it since this will release a lot of fibres in the form of asbestos dust (which is probably the easiest and hence deadliest way to inhale it), the ship is a ship of death.

-- Manoj Nadkarni

Kids For Change, February 2006
 
 
   
  The Clemenceau
  The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)
  The right to information